Rochelle claims she was cooerced into breaking the law (driving on a suspended license) in the name of friendship but when she was offered an easy way out of it by Tanner, she didn’t take it. Are you suggesting that Tanner is lying as well? Unless there’s proof of that, Rochelle’s story _is_ the least believable and there is more than reasonable doubt that rape took place.

Except for the fact that some people label a sober person having sex with an intoxicated person as rape? Or does that only count if the sober person is male?

And Alara, if you think that no woman would accuse a man of rape in order to ruin his life, you’re naive.

This is one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen in a while. You’ve gotta love a religious program teaching people that we aren’t all equal.
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There is no thumb put on the scale for this evidence, with the accusation making the complaining witness’ testimony more credible than the defendant’s. To do so would be to eliminate the standard of “innocent until proven guilty,” as defendants would be required to overcome an evidentiary burden in the states’ favor in order to prove their innocence. That’s not the way the system works for any crime. To repeat, with emphasis: your understanding of the criminal justice system is wrong.

Rapists should be punished, but your idea breaks with fundamental checks on the power of government that are necessary to have a free society. Your proposal would require any person accused of a crime to prove that they are innocent (and proving a negative is fundamentally impossible), rather than forcing the state to prove they are guilty before removing their liberty.

You also seem to be completely incapable of understanding that a change to criminal law will change how people interact with the criminal law. I don’t disagree that there is a low incentive for people to make false accusations as the law currently stands. However, if an accusation were taken as sufficient to prove that sex was non-consensual (with an affirmative defense available to prove that it was consensual), the result would be a change in incentives, with a sudden increase in the incentives to make false reports in order to use the court system as a way for people to attack intimate partners that have wronged them.

And then there’s your failure to remember that rape is not just forced sex – many states now (rightly) define rape to include any type of non-consensual sex, even if there was no force applied to the victim. This means that there doesn’t need to be evidence of drugs, restraints, or use of force in order for a rape to have been committed, which means your argument regarding the difficulty of a man sustaining a false rape charge against a woman he consensually had sex with is flat-out inaccurate.

There currently aren’t a lot of people who get a friend to spar with them, get some bruises, and then falsely accuse the person of beating them up.

I *don’t* see the threat of “omg, if we take the accusation of rape as seriously as we take the accusation of ‘x beat me up’ or ‘x stole my stuff’, people will lie!” as being all that serious, certainly not nearly as serious as the fact that thousands of innocent women are condemned to the punishment of being *raped* because their rapist was not arrested, prosecuted or convicted the first time he raped someone, because it’s not happening now in the crimes it’s possible for.

Also, no, it’s really unlikely that hordes of men will accuse women of raping them, because the physical experience of a woman raping a man is much more difficult to achieve than the physical experience of a man raping a woman. People would need a good deal of circumstantial evidence to believe that a woman committed rape, such as evidence of drugs in the man’s blood, ligature marks on his skin, a significant size difference in her favor, or some other physical evidence to suggest that she could have overpowered or threatened him. And because men don’t currently accuse falsely women of stealing from them when there’s no reasonable motive for them to do so, so why would they start falslely accusing women of rape?

I think the evidence suggests that in other crimes, when there’s a “person X said, person Y said” thing going on, and the physical evidence suggests that the incident happened and the question is whether or not it happened in a way that makes it a crime, the rate of false accusation is still really damn low. Why would rape be different just because we start taking the acusation of rape as seriously as we take the accusation of “so and so took my car?”

I’m not suggesting that we blindly assume, under any circumstances, that if Jane says John raped her she’s telling the truth. But if Jane says John took her car, and John says that no, she lent it to him, odds are Jane will win her case and John will be charged with stealing her car. If Jane says John beat her up and John says they were practicing martial arts… well, actually, that gets into the whole “women lie” thing again that applies whenever there’s a crime that women are disprorportionately victims of, so let’s say that if Steve says John beat him up and John says they were practicing martial arts, there would need to be evidence that in fact, not only do Steven and John frequently practice martial arts together but that John is dating Steve’s ex now and so Steve has motive to lie before anyone would acquit John. It’s *only* crimes that men commit against women that are held to this absurdly high standard of “if it’s theoretically possible that he’s telling the truth, she must be lying.” I want to see rape held to the same standard all *other* crimes are held to.

ANd no, I don’t think women are totally helpless and men are all-powerful. I’m well aware of the existence of female criminals, including women who abuse men. What I think is not that women are helpless and men are omnipotent, but that almost no one brings false accusations of crimes *ever*, and in almost all crimes we understand that simply the fact that an accusation has been brought is a piece of evidence in itself, but in rape, we’ll apparently take *any* absurd excuse a man can come up with as justification for why he isn’t a rapist, including “she voluntarily jumped into the bushes to have sex with a total stranger” and “she is pretending to be unconscious on tape while she’s being humiliated, raped and burned with cigarette butts because she wanted to be a porn star.” Rape is damn near the only crime this happens with. (Domestic violence is usually excused but not denied — “yes, he beat her within an inch of her life, but she flirted with another man and insulted his penis, so he was totally justified in doing it!”)

And, of course, you’re forgetting that, because rape charges can be brought against women as well as men (well, except in backwards states like Georgia, where raping a man is a the same crime as groping someone), men would gain this power over women too. Sure, it’d be held somewhat in check by social norms that prevent actual male rape victims from coming forward, but being able to send someone to jail simply by making an accusation is such a hefty power that it’s unlikely that unethical people would be able to resist.

Which leads back to the fundamental problem with your “argument,” such as it is: you premise your evidentiary weighting on the claim that no (or almost no) woman would lie about getting raped, but fail to see that giving such an absurd degree of weight to the accusation would create enormous incentives for someone of either sex to lie.